


Ebbs and Flows

by DunkinLove



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Bath Sex, Bathing/Washing, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Sauna, Swimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-08 18:26:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8856166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DunkinLove/pseuds/DunkinLove
Summary: The progression of Gaby/Illya's relationship involving bathing, washing, swimming, or just getting wet together *ahem*





	1. The Sink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redbrunja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbrunja/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this as a 500 word drabble challenge as I have a bad habit of letting my fics run on and on, and I had many ideas on this subject that I wanted to include! I hope you enjoy all 5 chapters.

Gaby's hands shake over stained skin, smudging the caked blood that has seeped into every crack. She desperately tries to rid herself of the drying crusted film, evidence of her first hand-to-hand kill. 

Illya looked over from the driver's seat, saw her hands, pressed on the accelerator a little more.

He had helped lift the body off her, her knife still lodged in the stiff tissue of her attacker’s throat. Gaby had laid stunned, drenched in sickly warmth. She hadn't been prepared for the sputtering fountain of gore that had rained down on her.

Nothing short of a lifetime on the killing floor of a slaughter house could have prepared her for it.

At the safe house, Illya silently assists her inside where she pulls away and all but stumbles into the bathroom, frantically twisting the groaning faucets, scrubbing her hands with a manic ferocity that threatened to draw her own blood out. The water ran pink and clotted down the drain.

Her hands clean but for the crust beneath her nails, she looks up into the mottled mirror in the dim light to see her neck and chest dark with another person's snuffed life, her soaked top blending in seamlessly. She spots small flecks close to the corner of her mouth. 

With a desperate choke she tears at her top, tosses it to the floor with a wet slap and splashes water on her neck and chest, smearing her skin with redness, dripping down her body, spreading everywhere. Bloodied water trails down her arms. She splashes more, nearly clawing at her chest, smearing and wiping and gasping. 

Gaby clutches the edge of the sink, her knees giving way when Illya comes up behind her, catching her beneath her arms.

He lowers her to the floor, kneels beside her and wipes her trembling arms and heaving chest with a towel, blotting and absorbing the worst of the gore. She calms, leaning against his shoulder, surrendering to his care as the blood came away with each stroke.

Illya leans to soak the towel with water, returning to dab at her face, gently removing even the smallest marks from her skin. Her trembling has nearly subsided and she sighs as her head falls against his chest. Illya runs the cloth over her arms, wiping away the last of the blood. She should feel ashamed; sitting half-naked on a bathroom floor in a ruined brassiere, nearly suffering a breakdown over some stains, but she only feels comfort. 

Illya drops the towel with her top, sits fully on the tiled floor as he pulled her onto his lap. Her eyes flutter close, her clean hand fisted in his shirt.

"It's okay," he says against the crown of her head.

Gaby nods, eyes still closed, believes him. Knows he has been here too, many years before. He doesn’t tell her it will get easier because maybe it won’t.

His arms wrap tightly about her, clean and comforted, the sound of his heartbeat against her ear.


	2. The Shower

She is rarely left alone at a bar for long, an inevitability that made her job easier, drew in marks with only a half-empty drink and a wistful sigh.

Tonight she'd rather be left alone...unless her husband decided to join.

If that was what he still was.

There were no neat debriefing notes filed away in a dossier calling to a close yet another faux relationship, returning them to solely colleagues.

The man who sidles up next to her makes quick note of her ring glinting in dark, wonders why she is buying her own drinks. She humours him for a time, listens to his inaccurate description of his less than brag-worthy vehicle when she hears the bar's door open and shut and feels a looming presence just behind her.

Her companion's eyes rise and rise, going round on their ascent. 

He apologizes and excuses himself without her husband needing to utter a word.

Gaby turns on her stool, glares up at him.

"Just in time to ruin the fun.”

“You look like you did not want to be bothered,” Illya says, scanning the room.

“Unless it’s by you?”

“I should not leave you alone,” he intones with unnerving conviction, “husband's duty.”

"Only when I'm being _bothered_ by someone else," Gaby huffs. He can't leave her alone and he can't be _with_ her.

Stupid, stubborn man.

Gaby storms back to their room, their marital suite that looked more like the cabinet war rooms, strewn as it were with maps, communications gear, and loaded magazines. She is stepping into the shower when she hears him enter the suite. She rolls the shower’s glass door shut and relaxes into the stream of hot water.

Gaby takes her time, letting the steam and heat ease her temper. A perturbed knock sounds at thirty minutes.

“I need to brush teeth,” he grumbles.

“Just come in!” she says over rushing water.

Silence.

“You said yourself you shouldn’t leave me alone,” she smirks under the spray.

She can feel him hesitate at the door.

Her eyes roll.

“You can’t see anything through the steam.”

Gaby hears the door open slowly, sees his shadow move into the room, knows he’ll be able to see hers behind the fogged glass. With a devilish grin she makes a show of washing down the length of her body, tilts her head back into the water with a sigh.

“Illya?”

“Yes?” a strained reply.

She twists the water off.

“Could you hand me a towel?”

More hesitation as he turns off his own faucet. 

"Husband's duty," she teases.

His tall form approaches the shower door, slow and unsure. She leans out, wet hair thrown over her shoulder, forearm crossed over her breasts. He almost forgets to hand her the towel.

Gaby grabs it from him with a flourish, drops her arm for a quick instant to slide the door shut, hopes he caught a glimpse.

They sleep on either side of their marital bed, duties neglected for one more night.


	3. The Sauna

It has been too long since he has had a proper sweat, let the perspiration build up on his skin and heat relax his muscles. 

The Finnish sauna they had access to during their wilderness training wasn't an exact replica of the _banya_ he had known and loved growing up but it was close and he found himself relaxing in a way he hadn't since he was a child. 

Illya's partners had allowed him to retreat to this private indulgence nightly, with only a little teasing about this nude activity.

They weren't wrong. That was tradition. It felt good to be so unguarded for once. 

Head tilted back and eyes closed, small beads of sweat are only just beginning to rise from his skin when he hears steps outside. He bolts for the door, ready to defend himself.

“It's just me,” a soft voice says as the door cracks open.

Illya throws himself back onto the bench and a towel on his lap.

“What are you doing?” he demands, adjusting the small cloth.

“Using the sauna,” Gaby says as she enters, bringing a cool breeze of summer air with her.

She closes the door and settles opposite, wrapped in a robe.

"It is seventy degrees in here, you will overheat," he scoffs.

Gaby smirks.

"I'm not wearing it," she says and shrugs off the robe. 

The air leaves Illya's lungs in a rush, the moisture evaporating in the intense heat. His manners demand he look away, but the sauna has made him languid and indulgent, so he drinks in the vision of her stark naked in the low light.

She feigns not to notice, leans back on her hands, sighs deeply with closed eyes, wrapped in the cocoon of warmth around them. Her body is lean and slight, just as he had imagined it would be.

Her nipples have hardened despite the temperature. He wonders what they’d feel like in his mouth. Sweat drips down his back like a trailing finger.

Gaby stirs from her pose and stands casually to ladle water onto the hot coals. The water goes up in a plume of steam, boiling away like the blood in his veins. Illya watches the soft roundness of her ass as she walks back to her bench.

She fixes his with a stare as she sits, all-consuming like the swelter of the room. Droplets of perspiration have built up on her tawny skin, shine between her breasts. His gaze lowers and he nearly passes out when she shifts and her thighs part a little further giving him the barest glimpse of what lies between.

His cock stirs beneath the towel which is nearly burning into his skin.

She stands again and for a moment he thinks she will come to him, remove the towel, demand he bare himself too, but she merely gathers her hair, wet at the nape, and nods toward the door.

“Swim?”

Illya’s mouth gapes and with smirk at his speechlessness, Gaby heads out the door.


	4. The Lake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't end the sauna one there, so this chapter picks up immediately from the last.

Illya peers out from behind the door just as Gaby is wading into the lake, utterly nude and beckoning to him over her shoulder with only a coy glance. Illya waits until she is submerged and swimming before following, his cock now hopelessly hard. He feels himself blush even in the relative darkness of the evening. 

Despite it being nearly midnight, this far north the sun is still pale pink on the horizon, giving the lake a dark dusky glow. The water is refreshingly cool after the heat of the sauna, far from the shock of jumping into the ice crusted rivers of his past.

Gaby swam to the far side of the small lake, her body a moving shadow rippling the surface. As he approaches, she playfully twists away and swims further. He catches up at the lake's far end.

Illya could just stand in the lake's depth. Gaby treads water in front of him, the top of her breasts just above the water's surface, round and wet. 

"What is this?" he wonders, gruff, unsure of what he is even asking. 

They had played these games before, even kissed, but always drew away at the point of no return.

"Getting to know you," she says, eyes luminous in the twilight, "more intimately."

Gaby drapes an arm over his shoulder to stay afloat, runs a cool hand down his cheek and kisses him. He groans and reciprocates, deepening the kiss, glides his hands over her bare body beneath the surface as her thigh straddles his hip. 

The hand on his cheek drops below, skims over the skin of his chest and abdomen. He gasps against her mouth when her hand strokes his cock. She pulls away to look up at him through wet lashes, lips still parted from his kiss.

"Yes?" she asks, stroking him idly.

He nods endlessly, her hand gripping him tighter, wrenching another grunt from him. His own hand runs down her side and between them, returning the favor. 

She is aroused and swollen and wetter than water, his finger slipping easily into her heat. She grips her thigh around him and moans, hand still working. Illya buries his face against her soaking hair, pants against her moist nape as her thumb drags over his tip and he nearly loses himself.

Illya crooks his finger, stroking steadily while he toys with her clit with the pad of his own thumb. Gaby keens, grips his shoulder tighter and rises up out of the water dripping against him, his other hand firmly palming the slippery softness of her bottom.

Her noises and erratic strokes, the feeling of her small wet breasts against his chest push him over the edge. Illya gasps her name and comes hard into the water.

Gaby wraps both thighs around his hips and rides into his hand, throwing her head back with long moan, her neck luminous in the moonlight. Illya kisses her there, strokes her to completion, her cries echoing off the lake’s surface.


	5. The Bath

"I was not expecting," Illya sputters as more water is dumped over his head, "that you were this serious."

He lifts his good hand from the bath to rub the soap suds out of his eyes.

"I thought you had ulterior motives."

"When have I ever had ulterior motives?" Gaby smirks, working the remainder of the shampoo out of his hair as she sat in his lap, "I'm just following doctor's orders."

Illya's injured arm laid along the tub's edge, and she could tell he was itching to tend to his own ministrations. The physician had ordered Illya to keep the cast dry and prescribed hot baths to ease his battered muscles. It wasn't explicitly stated that Gaby should be naked and in the bath with him, but she thought it was good bedside manner nonetheless. It was certainly helping him take his mind off his injuries.

"Besides, I'm enjoying this," she says honestly, rubbing a sea sponge over his shoulders, clavicle and chest, not necessarily for hygienic purposes 

The old château turned safe-house had a claw bath large enough to accommodate Illya's entire length and she wasn't about to pass up the rare opportunity to join him. Illya had grumbled at first, adamant that he wasn't a child and didn't need assistance bathing, but when Gaby has disrobed along with him he had quickly shut up and stepped in. Water had splashed over the edge when she had followed suit.

"And what about you?" Illya asks, running his fingers through the damp tendrils at the nape of her neck.

"Do I need help bathing?"

"Relaxing," he says as his good hand glided down her side under the water, "this is other purpose of these baths, yes?"

She flashes him a private smile from behind the veil of her hair, felt his fingers trace along the inside of her thigh, a whisper of a touch in the warm fragrant water.

“What are you doing down there?” she sighs when those same emboldened fingers brush against her as they had in the lake. 

Illya pulls her forward and presses his face to the flushed skin of her chest. 

“Getting lost,” he all but groans, fingers slipping inside her. She gasps at the flow of warm water that accompanies him at the intrusion.

Gaby tangles her own fingers in his freshly washed hair, lifting herself off his lap, buoyant and light. She can feel him against her thigh, hard and insistent and deliciously available. 

She pulls away, reaches below to position him. Before he can protest her urgency she settles down on his cock, stretching to accommodate every inch of him. It is now his turn to gasp, buried in her heat, hotter than the tepid bath water. 

Gaby sets an agonizingly languid pace, body rising and falling, leaving trails of water dripping down her sides. Illya grips the bath’s edge with the hand of his injured arm, resisting the urge to grip her hips and encourage her to ride harder, faster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was exceptionally difficult to keep to 500 words. I may expand on it at some point.


End file.
